CONCERT PREVIEW: Lots to rave about with Mogwai

Mogwai has scaled so many creative peaks in 20 years, from aggressive albums to pensive soundtracks, it has become one of the most influential bands in the loosely defined post-rock genre.

Comment

By Chad BerndtsonFor The Patriot Ledger

The Herald News, Fall River, MA

By Chad BerndtsonFor The Patriot Ledger

Posted May. 7, 2014 at 3:10 PM
Updated May 16, 2014 at 7:39 AM

By Chad BerndtsonFor The Patriot Ledger

Posted May. 7, 2014 at 3:10 PM
Updated May 16, 2014 at 7:39 AM

MOGWAI

With Majeure. At the House of Blues Boston, 15 Lansdowne St., Saturday, May 10, 6 p.m. Tickets $28.55 and available at the box office and via ...

» Read more

X

MOGWAI

With Majeure. At the House of Blues Boston, 15 Lansdowne St., Saturday, May 10, 6 p.m. Tickets $28.55 and available at the box office and via livenation.com.

» Social News

To hear Stuart Braithwaite tell it, “We want to write better music, play better shows and get better at what we do. And we’ve done so much. But there’s always more.”

Such determined aims might seem surprising at this stage of the game from Braithwaite, not least because Mogwai, the band he co-founded nearly two decades ago, has scaled so many creative peaks, from aggressive albums to pensive soundtracks, as one of the most influential bands in the loosely defined post-rock genre.

But with a massive world tour planned behind its first new album in three years, the Scottish quintet still operates like a work in progress. Braithwaite says the band plans to continue to win new converts, one dynamic, mind-blasting, distortion-laden, guitar-squalling, drum-clattering composition at a time.

Catch them at the House of Blues in Boston Saturday for a master class.

“Our fundamental goals are quite simple: get a record out with 10 good songs and play as well as we can,” said Braithwaite, responding to a reporter’s question politely but with no small suggestion of over-thinking the band. “We wanted a logical progression from (2011’s) Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, and to us it feels organic.”

Mogwai is easy to over-think. Same goes with post-rock, which as a concept suggests bands that connect the dots between sub-genres like shoegaze, progressive rock and instrumental metal but in essence use rock instrumentation to open up songs into epic soundscapes and noisy layers, incorporating effects such as psychedelic drone and industrial stomp, often with repetitive build-ups using different textures and timbres.

But too much description undoes the music’s visceral impact – Mogwai is a band to be felt as much as heard, let alone described. And that certainly stays true with this year’s “Rave Tapes,” which has familiar Mogwai touchstones, plus interesting side trips into acid-trip vocals (“Blues Hour”), spoken word (“Repelish”) and vocoder manipulation (“The Lord Is Out of Control”). Some critics have pointed to “Rave Tapes” as a move by Mogwai toward electronica, and that’s evident in synth-and-effects-laden tracks like “Remurdered,” but the album is still very much a balance of typically grandiose Mogwai (“Jim Morrison”) and dreamier, deceptively mellow stuff (“Take Me Somewhere Nice”).

“I think if there’s any difference now between how we used to (create) songs it’s that we got better at what we do and we’re quicker to identify what doesn’t work so well,” Braithwaite explained. “There’s always a lot of working things out, from the instrumentation to sequencers,” he said. “But we’re pretty true to how we’ve always done it.”